“In 'Losing My Cool,' I argue repeatedly that it is a terrible lie, which has been foisted on us and sold to us for decades now, that hip-hop culture equals black culture, that being authentically black means keeping it real.”

American cultural critic and writer

Thomas Chatterton Williams is an American cultural critic and writer. He is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, published in 2019, and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His work also includes writing for The New York Times Magazine and serving as an Easy Chair columnist for Harper's Magazine. He is a visiting professor of the humanities and a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022.